According to IP Watch, “the World Economic and Social Survey 2009, subtitled, “Promoting Development, Saving the Planet,” was released. The report, drafted by the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, a top secretariat office at headquarters in New York, focuses on climate change and calls for dramatic changes in the status quo in order… Continue reading
Date archives "September 2009"
Community Participation in Nature and Resource Conservation
The key insight is not to throw open the floodgates to undifferentiated public input, but to design group-based processes that enable online communities to collaborate on finding and vetting information for agencies. In this meditation on social learning through participative monitoring and management, Howard Silverman offers some interesting examples of new trends in nature and… Continue reading
The crisis of neoliberalism, ethical civil societies, and the new progressive relationalism in the UK
The New Statesman in the UK describes, with references to supporters and literature, four new progressive sensibilities, all with a flavor of ‘p2p’ in them. I find it extremely good news and significant that a mainstream social-democratic outlet notices this broad renewal in political thinking. Stuart White on the four strands: Left Communitarianism Neoliberalism rests… Continue reading
Reciprocity and power towards nature in northern Latin America
As Van Jones, a human-rights and environmental activist from Oakland, says, “Martin Luther King didn’t become famous by saying, ‘I have a complaint.’” The Left, in North America at least, has lost much of its vision, allowing the Right to frame the issues and spending all of our time fighting against their ideas instead of… Continue reading
James Boyle on Cultural Agoraphobia
In a contribution to a discussion at TechDirt on the implications of a new DRM system proposed for monitoring usage of Associated Press articles, James Boyle formulates a interesting hypothesis on the cultural bias against openness. James Boyle: “In my new book, The Public Domain I argue that we have a measurable cognitive bias against… Continue reading
Information feudalism and permanent rent in the cloud
Cory Doctorow’s editorial in the Guardian has an implicit warning. Cloud Computing may be the vehicle for extracting permanent financial rents, in a form of license-based feudalism. Cory also thinks it is unwise to rely on a corporate cloud in times of financial turbulence. (Information Feudalism is the thesis implicit in Jeremy Rifkin’s Age of… Continue reading
Stanford University photo scientists launch open source ‘frankencamera’ platform
More details at Stanford University News: DAVID ORENSTEIN: “Stanford photo scientists are out to reinvent digital photography with the introduction of an open-source digital camera, which will give programmers around the world the chance to create software that will teach cameras new tricks. If the technology catches on, camera performance will be no longer be… Continue reading
Madronna Holden on the congruence between resilience thinking and the partnership view
Key to the success of the partnership worldview is its attribution of agency to all in any socio-ecological system. Go to the original article for links to the material mentioned in this excerpt. Madronna Holden: “In their 10,000 years of sustainable living here, our land’s diverse cultures had this in common: they treated all natural… Continue reading
Conflict in Adoption of Collaborative Networks
After Leuven, 2006; Nottingham, 2007; Manchester 2009 (April and November 3), this will be the fifth conference dedicated to P2P Research, that is co-organized by the P2P Foundation!! A special thanks to Dr. Athina Karatzogianni for making it possible. More information: http://virt3c.wordpress.com/ Call For Papers The Inaugural Interdisciplinary Conference of the Virtual Communication, Collaboration and… Continue reading
Never Mind the Policy: Can Filtering Technology Stop p2p?
There is another story in the media about the ongoing debate about what (if anything) the government should be doing in response to online piracy; A rift has opened between music’s creators and its record labels, with a broad alliance of musicians, songwriters and producers fiercely criticising the business secretary Lord Mandelson’s plans to cut… Continue reading
eCorolla running
27th August was a great day for the eCars ? Now! project. The first Toyota Corolla converted from ICE drive to electric was running under its own power. (The Youtube video talks in Finnish, but the pictures speak a universal language.) Officially, the eCorolla 1.0 will be unveiled to the media later during the autumn…. Continue reading
Open design communities, entrepreneurial coalitions, and the partner state
To understand the reality or illusion behind projects claiming to practice co-creation or co-design, one must look at the polarities of power and control that determine the context in which the co-creative processes take place, with on the one hand the communities of external collaborators, and on the other side, the corporate entities. But before… Continue reading
How to Make the Commons Work: The 4i Method
It is clear that common resources – from the local (fish stocks in a river) to the global (the climate) need protecting as part of any considerations of attainability. In a recent article, Mark van Vugt, proposes his 4i model by which we can design systems and policies or communities that will protect our commons.
Continue readingThe Commercial Open Source Business Model
Commercial open source is controlled by exactly one stakeholder with the purpose of commercially exploiting it … The Intellectual Property Rights Imperative of Single-Vendor Commercial Open Source: Always act in such a way that you, and only you, possess the right to provide the open source project under a license of your choice. Here’s an… Continue reading
Wave of unexpected factory occupations follows meltdown
Our most popular blog entry in these 3 years of publishing is the one on factory occupations in Argentina. As reported here by Shawn Hattingh, the trend is now going global. “When the car parts manufacturer Visteon informed workers that the company would be shutting its doors, the workers decided to occupy the company’s plants…. Continue reading
The return of the ethical economy- in five installments (to start with..)
I’m back again from a long period of blog-silence. In the following months Nicolai at The Ethical Economy Ltd. and I will be finalizing the manuscript of our book : “The Ethical Economy. Business and Society for the 21st Century”, which will be coming out with Colombia University Press in 2010. I will however start… Continue reading